babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.

He’s associated more with style than substance. His official role in the House, Johnston noted, is as Liberal caucus critic for post-secondary education, youth and amateur sport. “It’s not,” he said, “economics or foreign policy.”

His dad had style and substance, and was Justice Minister before trying for the top job.

A few weeks ago the prospect of his entry worried me, but now I'm fairly confident the fantasy that he's ready to lead is a bubble waiting to be popped. He may even be smart enough to know that himself.

because canadian vote trudeau as PERSON, not party! How blind they are!

This IS the insight.

And the shottiness of the polling backs it up. One of the polls that sent Trudeau surging into first place had nonsensical increases in the undecided vote, which were taken out of the equation. They showed that even David McGuinty would somehow cause 5% of NDP voters to disappear. Not vote Liberal. *Disappear*.

"Would you vote for party X if something big changed?" will unsurprisingly yield more enthusiasm than "Would you vote for party X?"

There's always some legitimacy behind the sentiment in the polls. But I think Jeff Wells describes it well. It's a bubble. Whereas some polls underestimate someone's upside (a Jack Layton figure), some polls overestimate it (a Michael Ignatieff figure). The question you have to ask yourself is "as people get to know him better and better, under heavy media scrutiny, with high pressure from their rivals, will people like him more? or less?"

He’s associated more with style than substance. His official role in the House, Johnston noted, is as Liberal caucus critic for post-secondary education, youth and amateur sport. “It’s not,” he said, “economics or foreign policy.”

His dad had style and substance, and was Justice Minister before trying for the top job.

A few weeks ago the prospect of his entry worried me, but now I'm fairly confident the fantasy that he's ready to lead is a bubble waiting to be popped. He may even be smar t enough to know that himself.

Very easily popped. Justin Trudeau has called Mulcair a grumpy old man. Way to get voters Justin, used the failed discarded hand me downs attacks of the Tories.
Once again Justin just shows he's all style no substance.

Once again, those Ontario Liberals need to get with the program and go NDP to really cement us in first place. I think this will be easier once they have a real leader that can disappoint people. Right now they're still voting for the brand. They'll probably be shocked to see that their new leader, whoever it is, actually performs worse than Rae.

i like the look of that insanely high ndp lead in newfoundland, and where we seem to stand in the cities. like honestly, it's impossible to deny the moral legitimacy of an opposition party that represents every city in the country (except for loser calgary). obviously, we can't really game the scenarios until that fool trudeau is actually in place as leader, but i'm guessing the liberals around 18% will be where we land in 2015, with the bq and greens at 6% each, leaving 70% of the vote to be divided between the good guys and darth vader, and it's super encouraging to see that more and more, the maritimes are joining quebec to come off the map as real battlegrounds.

I don't know where he gets it from but Grenier claims the federal NDP are at 59% in Newfoundland and Labrador.

It comes from an Environics poll last week. This poll shows the NDP at 59%, Libs 22%, and Cons 18%. It must be read with caution as the regional sample size is small. However, even with this in mind, it shows you how biased Grenier is, as he projects that this would lead to 4 NDP seats and 3 Liberal seats. Both Grenier and his projection model, which is Liberal and incumbent biased, are totally out to lunch. Such a margin would more than likely lead to an NDP sweep.

It will be interesting in the next election when Eric tells everyone to vote NDP strategically because of incombency bias and because the NDP came in 2nd in most other races. I just wonder how he's going to be able to square that peg. He was part of the problem last time, saying people should vote lib strategically when it was steering voters wrong.

In defence of Mr Grenier, if you apply a straight swing based on the poll to the three strong Liberal Newfoundland seats they will all fall on the knife edge. Two barely NDP, one barely Liberal. His formula gives extra weight to incumbency so it is quite reasonable for him to project three Liberal wins.

Keep in mind, however, that many NDP votes are concentrated in St John's North where Jack Harris got 70%. The poll projects that the NDP vote would increase from about 32% across the province to 59%. A uniform swing wd therefore give Jack 97%. Either he wd be more popular than Stalin or some of that increase would be reflected in extra gains in other ridings.

In any event all seven N&L seats are clearly within range for the NDP.

No Stock, he hasn't told them to vote Liberal except that during the last election, for example, and in my area, because the libs had come 2nd last time, he was part of the strategic voting meme to vote liberal. It didn't matter that the libs had a unpopular candidate who wasn't even supported by their local riding association or that he hadn't bothered to check on local relavence.

We had a very popular local candidate, well respected and known in the riding, and right up until the last week, he still had the local lib candidate as the strategic best choice. The NDP ended up coming 2nd, behind the Con, and the lib far behind. Let's hope that next time, he doesn't say vote lib here.

Grenier's 308 is not a strategic voting site. He doesn't counsel people on how to vote. If you want to complain about bad strategic voting advice - you are barking up to wrong tree - its sites like leadnow and that "think twice coalition" nonsense that you should be talking about. All that Grenier does is take an average of polls and extrapolate the swing from them to all the ridings across the country. Its a very simple exercise that anyone who took math in high school can do.

I think you guys are giving him wayyyy more credit than he deserves. The only people who visit his site and pay any attention to his projections are people like us - hardcore partisan political junkies. I don't thik there is one single solitary person in Canada who changed how they were going to vote as a result of anything that Grenier has ever written.

"Surging Tories" title for latest Forum poll once again gives most favourable interpretation of results when both NDP and Cons having been bouncing up and down around 35% in quite a few polls now. They really don't want to state the obvious -they have been in or near a statistical tie in most polls recently.

The question is silly, if Chow ran for mayor there is zero chance that Adam Vaughan would run as well. Either it would be a straight two way fight of Chow vs. Ford or some right of centre socially acceptable Tory like Stintz would also run.